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The Fix Picks the NFL: Week 14

Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III could be a folk hero and playoff quarterback by the end of the season.

I’m pretty sure there’s no point to any of this. I’m pretty sure the cruelty of sniffing .500 on the season’s picks and the confidence of finally overcoming an unfeeling coin, only to plummet past the point of any reasonable defense of one’s claim to being a sportswriter, isn’t worth whatever I might be trying to accomplish in the pages of the Daily Fix. Because, to be honest, it hurts worse than the failure of a first crush, first college rejection, first unsuccessfully flipped omelette — it’s a deep kind of pain, the kind that twists the knife with every double-digit line called incorrectly, every last-second field goal to beat the spread, every miraculous Greg McElroy touchdown that takes the game but not the cover. All of this is horrible, and I’m not sure why anyone does it.

That said, the season is almost over, and there’s the slight chance that either Roth or I could rebound to inch a little bit closer to the threshold for abject mediocrity, at least if we’re trying to place some ulterior stock in our ability as observers. Thankfully, no one is doing that, and no one is prepared to call us out for doing not well enough. Which means both of us are prepared to watch a slate of games that, as usual, offer something for everyone. Houston and New England, the AFC’s top dogs, face off on Monday night. Ben Roethlisberger will make his return for the Steelers against the Chargers. The Redskins will hope to sustain their momentum and ride RG3 all the way to the playoffs. There’s a lot going on out there, even as there’s precious little to be found with us. But we thank you for reading, and for staying strong with our noble if misguided intentions to own the world, and to be wonderful and successful in all our endeavors. Is that so much to ask for?

He’d never admit to it, but you have to wonder whether Jeff Fisher ever loads up YouTube in the dark of the night to search for Robert Griffin III highlight videos and wonder what could’ve been had the Rams not shown such dedication to making their former No. 1 pick, Sam Bradford, into a quality quarterback and traded away the pick that would’ve allowed them to take the rookie Redskins phenom. Alas, there are more important things to worry about, like why every game St. Louis plays can’t be against the otherwise dominant San Francisco 49ers, whom they’ve played down the line this season. It’s hard to figure out how the Rams can do against any opponent when they’ve showed such maddening inconsistency, but the seeds of something impressive are certainly there: Look at how their defense has endured despite not having a defensive coordinator (the bounty scandal suspended Gregg Williams) all year. The Bills might have to rely on the kindness of strangers to see their games televised at home, but they’re not completely down and out. It’s the rare matchup between two losing teams that looks kind of interesting rather than an excuse to switch the channel. —JG

Somewhere along the way, the Bengals morphed from a good-bad team to a good-good one, riding a four-game winning streak toward what could be an unexpected playoff berth should the cards fall the right way. The key is a largely improved defense, which has picked its teeth with a string of anemic offenses in the last few weeks in preparation for the challenge of the final month, when they’ll face four teams who won’t be such automatic pushovers, including one against the Pittsburgh Steelers. And how could you not root for the Bengals, as lovable a team the NFL has to offer, with their garish uniforms and ginger quarterback? Apologies to the Cowboys, who deserve half as much as they think they do and could be a permanent downer for the next few years if these Andy Reid rumors come to fruition. It’s nowhere close to an objective metric, but why would any non-Texan, non-AFC North fan want to go with Dallas at this point in the season? —JG

In the wake of the Jovan Belcher tragedy, no one would’ve expected the Chiefs to be able to pull it together for a full game of footbal. But Kansas City pulled off a win Sunday, and while football might not be the most important thing on the team’s mind, a partial return to normalcy seems to be how they want to play it. Which brings us to this week’s game against the Browns, and the possibility that the emotionally galvanized Chiefs could spring for their second win in a row, or at least put up a strong effort while playing out the rest of the season. Mostly, it feels tough to place any confidence in the Browns to cover such a healthy spread, not when their two-game winning streak has been procured by the slimmest of margins and the Chiefs may yet dip into still-unseen reserves to play out the string on a high note. —JG

I can’t explain why, but the Eagles season feels like it might end with some kind of Zen-like resolution, now that the Andy Reid/Michael Vick era is all but officially kaput. With so much coaching ballast being booted from the team, and with Nick Foles permanently installed at quarterback, the Eagles finally have no expectations about how they should play. Now they can be content to play how they can, which is as a sub-.500 team good enough to stay within a score for most of the game before eventually falling in the end. The year will end, Reid and Vick will depart for different, not-as-green pastures and the Eagles will settle into a belated, unexciting rebuilding process. There’s no shame in that, you know? Against the Buccaneers, who’ve lost twice in a row while still clamoring for that wild-card spot, such placid mediocrity might be enough to come close to winning, or at least avoid total embarrassment. It’s a very strong endorsement, I know. —JG

Here begins the bandwagon, which is making favorites of the Redskins even against teams with far better records and reputations this season. It’s hard not to internally favor Washington, too, because Robert Griffin III is the type of player that makes one want to go and grab up a copy of “Madden” to run an approximate simulation of how awesome it must feel to dash around the field, more athletic and capable than anyone, flicking 60-yard bombs like you’ve never been intercepted, scrambling for 60-yard touchdowns like you’ve never been hit. But how can one avoid the hot hand without feeling like a bummer, especially with Washington’s big-play potential returned and Baltimore’s energy looking a little slack over the last few weeks? Forget all the cliches you’ve read about teams trying hard or not. On the cusp of a surprising playoff berth, there’s no doubt that the Redskins will maintain their effort level until there isn’t any reason to. —JG

Atlanta (-3.5) at Carolina DR: Atlanta; JG: Atlanta; KtTL: Atlanta

Athletes are prideful folk, and they’ll usually take the chances they can to assert said pride like boisterous rhinos stomping around in the mud. Here’s such an example: The Atlanta Falcons are 11-1, while the Carolina Panthers are 3-9. And yet here’s a member of the Panthers deciding to trash talk the Falcons, calling Carolina a “better” team and vowing to disrupt Atlanta’s playoff experience… even though they’d almost have to lose out the rest of this season in order to drop the NFC’s No. 1 seed. It seems a little bit hubristic to claim oneself superior to a team that’s won almost every game it’s played this year, but it’s not like the media does any type of job of shaming such predictions after the fact. (Maybe that’s the solution: Shame everyone for everything dumb they say, forever.) That said, such an intellectual standard applied to the media would force pretty much everyone running for the hills lest they be forced to defend their bad opinion (which is how this Fixer still picked the Bears to cover when Jay Cutler was injured). Maybe everyone sort of needs a break from thinking about things this late in the season. But even though the 11-1 Falcons don’t feel like an 11-1 team, they should still be good enough to pull off the close cover. —JG

Some day, someone will makes a movie about the 2012-13 Jets season that will be loosely patterned off “Lincoln,” as strong-willed patriarch of the union Rex Ryan seeks to accomplish the impossible task: make the Jets successful while still keeping Mark Sanchez at quarterback. As we know, the Jets wouldn’t win their fifth game last week without the ditching of Sanchez for untested backup Greg McElroy, whose miniscule last-second effort made him the best dude on the field. And yet Sanchez will remain the starter this week, with the embarrassment of a similar scenario unfolding apparently not enough to deter the Lincoln-like Ryan from doing things his way, always. This could be the film’s climactic moment, when Sanchez rallies the team for a four-game win streak to somehow sneak into the playoffs and get blown out by the Patriots in the first round. Or it could be the moment when everything descends into an unadulterated bloodbath as Sanchez stinks it up again and a revenge-minded Tebow assassinates Ryan (in the press, of course). It’s an important, unsure period, but if anything good is going to happen in the rest of this Jets season, it would have to start by dispatching the Jaguars, who’ve somehow been unable to deliver on all of the promises of the Chad Henne reign. Fingers cautiously crossed. —JG

At the risk of indulging in the goofy weepy-woo sentimentality particular to this brutal league, the greater part of the Colts’ astounding and surprisingly enduring success this season seems to come down to self-belief. Having the league’s easiest schedule and one of its two transcendent rookie quarterbacks certainly helps, of course. But the way that the team has come together in the wake of rookie coach Chuck Pagano’s cancer diagnosis is more than an Inspiring Football Story, although it is that. It’s also a testament to the strength of the intangible and fortune-driven in a sport that’s otherwise rigorously mechanized and game-planned. The reason the Colts’ season seems weird — the 8-4 record and the negative point differential on the season; the likely playoff berth; the fact that interim head coach Bruce Arians is probably the NFL’s Coach of the Year — is because it is, because it conforms too much to some otherwise unconvincing old storylines. There really is, for all the hoariness of the NFL’s violent take on the Power Of Positive Thinking, something strange and interesting and undeniable at work, here. Although getting to play the Titans twice a year certainly doesn’t hurt. —DR

Chicago (-3) at Minnesota DR: Chicago; JG: Chicago; KtTL: Minnesota

Adrian Peterson is playing as well as he has in years, which is saying something, given that the Vikings running back was for some time the most dominant offensive player in the NFL. Brian Urlacher is not playing at all this week, which is also worth mentioning, given that he has been as dominant as Peterson in his own right. Important as all that is — and as much as the Bears, fattened on a cupcake-bar early schedule, seem due and doomed to a regression — there’s still the matter of the Vikings not being all that good. The Bears are shorthanded on both sides of the ball and could be without three of their top four receivers, but still sufficiently talented as to have an edge on the patchwork Vikes. This year, as in many years past, Chicago’s offense has been carried to a great extent by the defense. That may or may not be enough to keep the Bears on cruise control once the weather really gets cold. This week, though, and against this opponent, it doesn’t seem too much to ask. —DR

There was not a line for this game when your Fix Picker made this pick. This was because it was not yet official that Ben Roethlisberger, as opposed to Charlie Batch, would start for the Steelers. Roethlisberger will be playing, it seems, albeit with a typically terrifying Roethlisberger injury that threatens his aorta and is scary just to think about. The late-breaking line makes sense but raises a question of its own: At what line could you imagine picking the Chargers? The Chargers are shuffling, in their typical aggro-gloomy zombie mode, through another disappointing and flub-intensive season. The difference, this time, is that it appears the team is belatedly prepared to part ways with perma-thwarted coach Norv Turner and tough guy general manager A.J. Smith. Heads-up, on the road, and against a Steelers team in better health than it has been for a month, the Chargers are tough to pick. But with a line, or anywhere else, against any other team, the same more or less applies. —DR

Miami at San Francisco (-10)DR: San Francisco; JG: Miami; KtTL: Miami

Few cities in the U.S. are as punchline-ready as San Francisco. Yes, it’s probably the most beautiful city in the country and has much to recommend about it. But the jokes about its residents — fussing over raw-milk cheeses and mini-batch coffees, trying in vain to compost their old iPads, wearing more than one scarf at a time — make themselves at this point. There’s something to the jokes, but San Francisco is also home to sports fans as maniacal as those in more ostensibly straitlaced cities. Those fans, presumably, are a bit nervous about their otherwise excellent team’s strange problems with the St. Louis Rams, and they’re possibly a bit on edge regarding the decision to hand the quarterbacking job to young Colin Kaepernick after his not-good Week 13 performance in a loss to St. Louis. This is a reasonable enough response, but we’ll know if they (and the Niners) have anything to worry about after this week’s matchup against the fading Dolphins. Miami had a nice little blip of competence in October, but they’ve been mostly mediocre besides that. Jake Long, the ace left tackle who protects rookie quarterback Ryan Tannehill from pass rushers like the 49ers’ Aldon Smith, is done for the season after suffering a torn quadriceps last week. The Dolphins don’t make many mistakes but aren’t all that good, either. In that sense, they’re an ideal confidence-building team for Kaepernick and the 49ers both. It won’t do anything about the scarf jokes, but it should at least chill those 49ers fans out a bit. —DR

Arizona at Seattle (-10)DR: Seattle; JG: Arizona; KtTL: Arizona

This is not true of most teams suffering through eight-game losing streaks. But what the Arizona Cardinals do well — and there are some things, starting with an excellent, opportunistic defense and extending to the reliably awesome presence of Larry Fitzgerald on the field — they do very well. What they have done exceptionally poorly, though, is continue to start abysmal quarterbacks, and what that has done in turn is negate pretty much every good thing about the team. It’s not entirely Arizona’s fault that non-abysmal would-be starter Kevin Kolb is very badly hurt. (He is suffering from the awful-sounding malady “detached ribs.”) It is the team’s fault that their other options at the position are John Skelton and the epically overmatched Ryan Lindley, who have fumbled the gig between the two of them over two painful months. Skelton, who is marginally the less terrible of the two, has the job back this week. He’ll be leading a demoralized team, on the road, against a very good defense. It will almost certainly not be fun to watch, or terribly close. It could be worse, but that seems like less of a consolation by the week. —DR

New Orleans at New York Giants (-4.5)DR: New Orleans; JG: New Orleans; KtTL: Giants

For all the reasons that the Saints have lost football games in the past few years — bad defense, mental errors, more really bad defense — last Sunday presented a first of sorts. In New Orleans’ loss in Atlanta last Thursday, the responsibility fell primarily on quarterback Drew Brees, who had an oddly and uncharacteristically terrible game. In what was the Saints’ first decent defensive effort of the season, Brees’ five interceptions cost the team chance after chance. Brees won’t do that again, this week or probably for another few years, but if the defense can put up another solid effort — and, to reiterate, it took 10 weeks for New Orleans to hold an opponent below 400 yards — this could be interesting. It will, in all likelihood, be interesting no matter what: The Saints are always fun, the Giants are (especially when in neurotic-thrashing mode, as they currently are) an experience, and both teams are capable of scoring and giving up plenty of points. The Giants are the better team, and they’re playing with a playoff spot on the line, but they have also been flubby and flat for a month with the exception of their Week 12 win over the Packers. The Saints defense can help with that. But Brees, the real one and not the Ryan Lindley impersonator from last week, should at least keep things close. —DR

There are a number of reasons why the New York Jets are the New York Jets, while an objectively more neurotic and considerably more talented team like the Lions is left to do its self-defeating thing in relative obscurity. The Jets have a louder coach and play in a more heated media environment. ESPN has a fixation on the Jets’ backup quarterback that would, if played out in a different venue, result in a restraining order. But the Lions have the edge everywhere else. They’re a team stacked with Pro Bowl talent and stuck with a 4-8 record. They’ve lost five of those games by six or fewer points, and they’ve lost their last three by a total of nine points. More to the point, for the Jets comparison, is that the Lions are in a constant state of internal revolt and internecine warfare. They’re talented enough to beat the Packers outright in this one — they’re talented enough to beat any team in the NFL. But if their surprisingly slept-on season of disappointment, self-harming and anonymous carping has taught us anything, it’s that they’re likely to lose this one in a close, excruciating and squabble-intensive manner. internecine

No team in the NFL has been quite as dominant — or quite as sour and peevish about it — as the great Patriots teams of the last decade. This is probably a good thing, just in terms of the grump-vibes those old, implacable Patriots teams threw off, but it has a distorting effect on how we judge teams like Houston. The Texans are 11-1 and look just that good in most weeks, but they haven’t dominated like the Patriots teams that set the recent standard for dominance. That Houston’s defense has been among the NFL’s best, and that its balanced offensive attack has been nearly as good, is all right there in the numbers. But because the Texans have won methodically, instead of with New England’s old total-war lopsidedness, they somehow feel a bit less brilliant than they have been. This is how an 11-1 team winds up an underdog, albeit against a very good Patriots team. But easy dominance is still dominance. —DR

SPORTS, THE JOURNAL WAY

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